Iran finally strikes back

Israel has had its bell wrung by an Iranian missile strike; Are we heading for a massive war in the Middle East? Sure looks like it to me!

Good evening, my friends.

I was gone for most of the afternoon and evening, out doing deliveries. By the time I got back, I was quite behind on all the latest news from the Middle East. Imagine my surprise when I realized that the Iranians had launched a huge missile strike against Israel.

Note that I am fatigued from a very long drive that left my legs feeling like jelly. So please excuse me if my thoughts are somewhat scatterbrained this evening. I need a long sleep to recover from the hell route I did today, but I wanted to share some thoughts before the news of the Iranian attack ages too much.

Before I get into that, however, I want to share an interesting story about Hezbollah and how Israel managed to kill Nasrallah. The short version: Hezbollah got complacent and sloppy, and that was all the Israelis needed to unleash some serious whoop-ass on Hezbollah and obliterate Nasrallah.

Here are some details from a NY Post story:

The devastating airstrike that killed Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah was the result of a years-long operation by Israeli intelligence that penetrated the terror leader’s entire network — allowing him to be tracked to his underground command center in Beirut.

The Israeli military used 80 tons of specially designed bunker-busting bombs to blast through the heavily fortified hideout on Friday and kill the slippery Nasrallah — who had survived multiple previous attempts to assassinate him.

Nasrallah’s death was exactly what Israel had been hoping for when it launched a bombing campaign that day, the Financial Times reports.

Unbeknownst to Nasrallah, Israeli intelligence was well aware of the movements of Hezbollah’s leadership following years of hacking and surveillance work on the Lebanese terror group — which is one of the largest and best-armed militias in the world.

The Jewish state got its big break in 2012 when the militant group deployed its fighters to Syria to help ally President Bashar al-Assad quell an uprising.

Former Israeli intelligence officials and Lebanese politicians told the FT that the battle in Syria unearthed a trove of information from the otherwise secretive terror group, with Hezbollah constantly publishing posts on its slain fighters that revealed their personal information.

“They went from being highly disciplined and purists to someone who [when defending Assad] let in a lot more people than they should have,” Yezid Sayigh, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Middle East Center, told the outlet.

“The complacency and arrogance was accompanied by a shift in its membership — they started to become flabby.”

So it’s clear that Hezbollah’s security slowly deteriorated over a long period of years, and it ended up costing the life of Nasrallah and many others. Nasrallah, according to a report from the Israelis, supposedly died in a cloud of toxic smoke:

An Israeli news outlet has claimed Hezbollah chief Hassan Nasrallah may have “suffocated” from toxic gasses inside his secret bunker after it was demolished by an Israeli airstrike.

Officials pulled Nasrallah out of the bunker on Sunday, finding his body intact with no visible wounds on him, Israel’s Channel 12 reported.

This suggested he was buried by rubble after 80 tons of bunker-busting bombs were dropped on his fortified hideout on Friday,

The Israeli outlet claims the cave-in caused the 64-year-old to suffocate and die in “agony” as the room filled with fumes from the smoke and explosions.

Take that report with a grain of salt, as I have seen no independent verification of it. However, I suppose it might be true if his body had no wounds on it. But the bottom line is that Nasrallah is gone now, and the Israelis got the scalp they wanted in the most public and humiliating way for Hezbollah.

Now on to the main event: The attack on Israel by Iran. Simplicius, as usual, has a great report with tons of details and videos from X, Telegram and other social media sites. Rather than regurgitate his coverage, I urge you to read his report in full and see the videos he has assembled of the Iranian missiles hitting targets inside of Israel.

The big takeaway here is that the Iron Dome is likely a piece of crap. It’s debatable if it even stopped any of Iran’s missiles, or if the explosions in the sky are the Iron Dome missiles just exploding in the air. Nobody seems to know for sure.

Russia Today reports that the Iranians say they used hypersonic missiles against Israel:

Iran used hypersonic missiles for the first time during its strikes on Israel on Tuesday, the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) has announced.

Iran launched several salvos of missiles in what the IRGC called a response to the recent Israeli killings of the heads of Hamas and Hezbollah, as well as an Iranian general who was in Lebanon.

Fattah-2 hypersonic missiles were used in the attack to bypass the Israeli radars, Iranian media reported on Tuesday evening, citing the IRGC.

The Guard claimed that 80-90% of the missiles used in ‘Operation Honest Promise 2’ struck their targets, among which were the Tel Nof air base near Tel Aviv and the Netsarim area near Gaza, where they said “a large number of Israeli tanks” was destroyed.

The US claimed it shot down some Iranian missiles, but that claim also strikes me as bullshit. However, given that almost everybody in DC is battling to fellate Israel the most, you can expect those kinds of lies to flow endlessly as the crisis continues. Truth is always the first casualty of war, especially in an empire of lies.

Israel, of course, is pretending that almost all the missiles were intercepted and everything is hunky-dory. 🙄 They are lying, of course, as almost any country would do after just getting a pasting from a hypersonic missile attack.

I ran into the image below, which is circulating on social media. Thus far, I have been unable to verify its claims (Simplicius points out that Israel likely had its F-35s in the air during the attack). However, if true, then the Iranian missiles did their job as the loss or disabling of 20 F-35 jets is no small matter for the Israelis. We will not know for sure unless there is some independent verification of the claim.

You can view additional tweets by that account on X too.

The Israelis now want the entirety of the West to support them, as they believe that “Iran crossed a red line.” If that’s true, then Iran isn’t the only country that crossed a red line, right Israel? 🙄

Netanyahu’s main goal with all of this was to draw the US into a large war with Iran. For some reason I cannot discern, he seems to believe that doing so would ensure an Israeli victory. Like so many others, he apparently has not realized that the empire is the weakest it has been since World War 2. He actually believes that the US can successfully ride to the rescue of Israel. Smoke another one, Benjamin. 🚬 🙄

Regarding Israel going into Lebanon, Simplicius had this to say about it, and I agree with his assessment:

To understand geostrategy and geopolitics, one must understand that both side’s aims are to appear victorious, particularly in frozen-style conflicts where no truly decisive victories are possible for a variety of reasons. As such, each side strives to posture and affect some kind of big moral or political victory. In Netanyahu’s case, he would love to present some kind of victory to fortify his weakening rule.

Thus, there’s a strong chance that Israel could go in, do some damage as always, and amid mounting international pressure, withdraw under the guise of some “major victory” based on claims of disabled Hezbollah infrastructure, etc. Meanwhile, Hezbollah merely has to keep the IDF from advancing to some key point like the Litani River, and credible victory can be claimed for them, no matter the losses. Iran can then chime in and say their ‘overwhelming attack’ knocked out so much Israeli infrastructure as to have thwarted the whole campaign. It’s really a theater of sorts, with nothing of note being accomplished in the end.

Israel’s objectives make no logical sense and are not realistically achievable. That is, the chief stated objective of creating a buffer zone such that northern Israel can be secure from Hezbollah rocket attacks in order to facilitate the return of Israeli citizens. But any such settlement cannot possibly last because it would require Israel to devote inordinate forces to occupying all of southern Lebanon indefinitely. And if they were to withdraw, then Hezbollah can immediately resume acting as before. That’s not to mention the fact that Hezbollah has longer range capabilities such that pushing them back to the Litani would not accomplish much, as that’s a mere 23km from the border, a distance easily covered by around 50% of Hezbollah’s rocket types.

Thus, most likely Israel will take a few border villages, then if they cannot suck Iran into a giant regional war, backdoor emergency agreements will be struck by the US to prevent having to go to war against Iran. Israel would then save face by withdrawing under shallow claims of some obscure ‘victory’ with a list of phony Hezbollah assets destroyed, etc. At the same time, Israel will probably get a bunch of secret concessions from the historically weak US administration in exchange for saving the US from having to do heavy lifting against Iran.

So much of this is such bullshit and such a waste of everybody’s time, as well as lives and money. But, as Simplicius points out, this is how geopolitics in the Middle East works. It really is a shit sandwich, and everybody is forced to take a bite, but, in the end, little or nothing is resolved.

Regarding the US attitude toward the Iranian attack, Biden and the rest of them talk tough and babble endlessly about “supporting Israel,” but you can bet that there is a strong contingent at the Pentagon that wants nothing whatsoever to do with a war against Iran. They know full well how weak the empire is and how empty its armament stores are after wasting so much of them by supplying Ukraine in its war against Russia.

The only ones in the US who truly want the US to get drawn into a war with Iran are the Neocons. They’ve been lusting after such a war for more than 30 years, and they likely see this as their best, and possibly fleeting, opportunity. They are allied with Netanyahu and the rest of the Israelis.

Keep your fingers crossed that saner heads prevail in Washington, as a war with Iran is likely to explode into World War 3, given Iran’s connection to Russia. As if the Ukraine war weren’t bad enough, the idiot Neocons want to add fuel to the fire by starting a huge war in the Middle East. If Trump wins, he needs to do a purge of as many of the Neocons as possible out of the State Department and Pentagon before they can connive the world into World War 3.

We shall see what happens next. Last I heard, Israel was vowing revenge on Iran for the attack, but that might be harder to pull off than if enough people in Washington, DC, decide that enough is enough and put the brakes on any more escalation. We shall see soon enough what will happen. The last thing we need is a gigantic war in the Middle East. It serves no one’s purpose except Netanyahu's, and that is reason enough to avoid it altogether.

I wish you all a good evening. 💀

UPDATE: Somebody posted this and it’s worth noting as food for thought:

UPDATE 2: This also is worth noting:

---

How you can support my writing

• Please share this post

• Tip with Buy Me A Coffee

• Tip with Bitcoin

• Buy a paid subscription

Thank you; your support keeps me writing and helps me to pay for rent, electricity, food, car payment and insurance, heat, and other necessities.

All contributions from readers are greatly appreciated. 👍🏻 💀

---